Thought I found an easy way to boost my landing count, accidentally fine tuned my low speed handling skills, gained new understanding of auto speed reaction delay when climbing, tuned senses to recognize early signs of stall, developed expert flare skills.
Casual server, XCub, no passengers, no cargo, ~12lbs fuel, window open to enjoy tropical breeze. Taxi from PHNL GA1, to 4R, take off and perform touch and go’s every 30 Mississippi’s, reset autospeed to 40kts after every touchdown, announce go around, announce inbound for 22R making left traffic, touch and go’s every 30 Mississippi’s, announce go around, announce inbound on 4R making left traffic, lather rinse repeat.
PHNL 4R is a 9,000ft runway that points almost directly into a constant 10-17kt headwind. An XCub can fly over 4R at ~28kts ground speed allowing up to 7 touches for each go, but you can’t pop up in altitude or accidentally touch your wheels to the asphalt before 30 seconds are up or you’ll reset your timer without a landing credit. Hovering a few feet above the ground for so long at near stall speeds is a challenge!
Another way to get landings is to spawn at EGLL on casual and takeoff from 27L, and land on 9L. I got 100 landings in an hour+ like this and got to grade 5!
I do that all the time, it’s gotten be 69 landings in 5X minutes. I did it today and got 50 landings in under an hour and got grade 5 meaning I have accomplished my goal of reaching grade 5 without any violations or ghosts.
grade 5 without violations is not something we see very often. congratulations.
i myself will be at grade 5 shortly, with 6 violations. they stick out like a sore thumb! i regret my stupid mistakes made long ago in the training server…
i got ghosted once too, but fortunately that ghost was reversed after it was deemed that the ATC was at fault.
Thought I’d add my 2¢ and contribute to the conversation.
Do I think it’s cheating? Not at this point. I’m sure the devs are aware people use this technique, and the landing timer is still set to 30 seconds, which should be the easiest thing to adjust. 2 or 3 minutes would make a realistic timer as it’d be hard to do a proper pattern in less than that. Also, it takes and develops skill while performing low speed low altitude passes over a runway.
Is it in the spirit of “realistic flight simulator environment”? Pretty obvious answer there.
But how many of us actually sit through every 14-hour semi-circumnavigation fuel burn monitoring wind, traffic, airspeed, etc? (You get a pass here if you sleep in your closet with a seatbelt on😁) I think a little leeway should be expected for video games and understanding that any time there’s a grading metric players will work out an efficient strategy for achieving the goal.
It pretty much goes to tell, high risk = high rewards 🤷🏽♂️…It’s difficult because it ain’t easy to control the XCub in those winds and I assume it’s the best way to farm XP as you normally get more XP in higher crosswind landings / touch and goes